How To Improve Your Site Loading Speed With Images?

You may run into trouble if your WordPress images are loading slowly.
In this article, we shall understand the importance of optimizing images and how through this, you can work on your WordPress site performance optimization.

Why Are Images Important?

For starter, images can help your website look the best from the rest. Although using image to deliver your message is good, this comes at a cost. If the images are heavy then your site will be at a disadvantage because it will mean that your website will take longer to load. Thus if you improve the image loading speed, the site’s performance improves as well which will help increase conversions, user-experience and improve SEO.

The Worst Offenders

Oversized images can really weigh down your webpages. For example- If you add images that are of size 2MB each, your site will already cross the mark of 1.5 MB size with a single image.

Images can be quite large, a DSLR image can run anywhere from 4MB to a whopping 12MB. If you use any of the DSLR images without optimizing it first, chances are you will screw up the performance of your page.

By simply resizing images, you can improve the performance of your site. This will lower the hosting charges as mostly your host will charge you extra for the disk space. Optimizing your images will help in providing your users a great experience and this can be seen throughout the devices. With the popularity of Smartphone, Google tweaked their algorithm and announced page speed ranking factor for the mobile searches.

This just means that you will need to create a web design that serves images according to the mobile devices even when the connection is slow. No point in serving retina images that are intended for desktop as it can increase the load time of your site.

Image SEO- Google has changed mobile optimization and the way it affects the ranking. The image search results has made a change as well which in turn had made a massive change in Image SEO as well.

In 2013, Google added image button to image search results which lead to the users going directly to image instead of the webpage, leading to an enormous drop (about 63%) in traffic of many websites.

This changed by the year 2018, Google removed the image button so that traffic can flow to the webpage instead moving directly to the image button.

Effects of Image Optimization

If the images are large, your WordPress website will be too slow and this can lower the conversion rate as well. Image optimization can lead to higher conversions and determine the potential customers because of search traffic.

Improve loading speed of your site with Images
Here are a few simple steps you can do on your WordPress website to speed up image loading:

• Remove useless images- This is the easiest way to decrease the page weight and make fewer HTTP requests. If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, make sure to optimize the images.

• Use Images which are sized correctly as the container: If the images are too large, you won’t be able to see it when you load your site. You can fix this by determining the size of the image and replace it to an appropriate size.

• Use correct format- Use the correct format according to your needs. Animated files like GIFs are inefficient file format which can lead to a slow loading page.

• Enable Lazy Load- Lazy loading delays the loading of the images that aren’t in the viewpoint. This means the browser will wait to download the images so it can serve the images seen by visitor, faster.

• CDN to improve image loading- CDN can transfer the data required to load the images faster. This can help deliver your site’s images load quickly.